Just think of the fun you could have racking them up for a training partner and convincing him that he just squeezed
out 505 pounds on the bench without breaking a sweat.

(Power systems makes 15-pound aluminum "training bars" too, in case you want the look of a real
olympic bar at one-third the weight. It's the perfect gift for somebody this season, and I'll let you
know as soon as I think of who.)

All the same, international film distribution is a competitive business and anything I spend on standards conversion
and creating masters is money that the producer doesn't get. There are a lot of starving filmmakers out there, but
plenty of them are not starving by choice, so the more that they get to keep from sales and royalties, the happier they
are.

I try to do as much as I can in-house, both for reasons of cost and for speed and efficiency, but a lot of jobs I do have
to outsource: it's just not cost-effective for me to have a couple of $35,000+ digibeta PAL decks, not to mention a
$100,000 Alchemist system, especially considering that standard-definition is the wave of the past. It's not obsolete
yet, but it's definitely on its way.

Sony HVR-M25u universal DVCAM/HDV deck

Enter the Sony HVR-M25u DVCAM/HDV deck. It's an imperfect format, but it supports both PAL and NTSC DVCAM and
a limited selection of HDV formats. As an added bonus, PAL DVCAM uses 4:2:0 subsampling, which is not precisely the
same as the 4:2:0 chroma subsampling as implemented in the DVD standard, but it's a lot closer than NTSC DV's 4:1:1.

So for some special requests for one-off master tapes I was making for a smaller distributor, I wanted to try the experiment
of doing the PAL conversion right here on Roo, my handy video editing machine. The other motivation--and also the complication--is
that the source format for the movie in question was 1080p 29.97fps. To my mind, it made more sense to go from 1080 lines of resolution
straight to 576 rather than scale 1080 lines down to 480 and then back up to 576, losing that much more detail in the process.

The problem was the 29.97fps part. Going from film's standard 24fps to either PAL or NTSC is trivial and performs extremely
well and reliably. For the best video quality, you can encode DVDs and Blu-Ray disks at 24fps and any player in the world
will automatically adjust the video output to the viewer's target display. So if you're planning to make a movie, just do it at
24fps progressive. That will make life easiest for you and the distributors.

But this movie was already completed, so knowing how it *should* have been shot wasn't very useful. Instead I set about the
task of doing a quick-and-dirty 29.97 1080p to standard definition PAL conversion with a short deadline and a limited budget.

My first attempt was to place the movie source in an Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 PAL timeline and see what came out. The results
were absolutely horrible, quite mysteriously absolutely horrible. Smooth pans and movements in the original film were converted
into stuttery, jumpy, back-and-forth motions. It's the "back" part that befuddles me: Adobe's video suite was not even converting
(or deleting) frames in order: an actor walking across the screen would hopscotch a few steps, then jump back to an earlier moment,
then start bouncing forward again from there. That made no sense, but obviously that wasn't going to work.

I'd heard reasonably good things about RE:Vision Effects
Twixtor and if I'd had more time for the project
I probably would have tried it out. They do offer a demo version, but there is absolutely no information anywhere on their
website regarding the limitations of the demo version, so I had no way of knowing that spending the time to install and
configure it would result in anything I could actually use to evaluate it.

Avisynth, on the other hand, is free, and there's
a lot more information available on its options and limitations. What it lacks in user-friendliness, it makes up for in flexibility,
so for my first attempt I tried doing a frame-rate conversion using Fizick's
MVTools Plugin:

The results were certainly better than the mess that Adobe Premiere had made: slow pans looked really quite good,
but fast movement and cuts had horrible artifacting. I tried a few variations on the parameters, but none yielded results
I could use.

My next thought was to try the simpler approach of doubling the NTSC frame rate, decimating the frames, resizing them
to 50i fields, and then reassembling the video stream from there. That was better, but the discontinuity between adjacent
interlaced fields was often too obvious.

(The reason for the 960 width above and for doing the final resizing in Premiere Pro
in all cases is that the distributor wanted a 4:3 full-frame version, but the composition of the film made doing a simple
center-cut unsatisfacory. Thus, I resized to a widescreen version with a non-widescreen PAL pixel geometry and did the
trimming and resizing as appropriate afterwards.)

And so I tried the simplest approach of all: reclock the source to 30p, decimate to 25p, and then resize in Premiere. There was
some judder visible in slow pans and tilts, but the results were good enough for this project. If I'd had more time, I probably could
have gotten extremely good results by alternating sections from conversion #1 and #3, using the first for slow pans and tilts,
the second for fast movement and cuts.

(I have no doubt that any of the many Avisynth experts out there could come up with a better approach than any of these, but since
I didn't find anything comparable in my own internet searches, I thought I would toss these out for the world to critique.)

Seeing RED (One)

Fortunately, these are things I don't have to worry about on the projects we're shooting here. Not only are we sticking
with 24p, we're shooting most everything on the RED One--4K resolution and all your
favorite 35mm movie camera lenses.

4K resolution is quite a big step up from standard definition and even from the highest high-definition standards. By shooting
and editing at 4K, you have the freedom of doing compositing, resizing, and computer-generated effects that will look flawless
when scaled down to standard definition or 1080p high-def.

You also have the freedom to go skiing on your lunch break while you're waiting for a given task to finish rendering. This is the
first time I've started overclocking my editing machines since the days when I managed to push an Intel 80286 all the way up to
25MHz (up from a stock 12MHz).

Suddenly, stringing together render nodes like Christmas lights with Infiniband has turned into
a practical decorating style instead of just something I do for the fun of it.

Comparison of common video format resolutions

But even while I'm moving into the realm of ever higher definition workflows out here, I keep running into filmmakers who are still determined
to do the opposite:

The Great Cthulhu is not impressed with your puny letterboxed frame

This is what not to do.

If you want to make movies destined for the big screen, do not shoot them in 4:3 non-anamorphic standard definition video
with the top and bottom of your screen blocked off by black bars. This is what the result will look like:
for the average viewer with a recent model TV or any distributor who is viewing your film on a portable DVD player to decide
whether they want to acquire it, they will see an itty-bitty version of your movie in the middle of the screen which is either
small to begin with...or big because they paid the extra bucks to see an extra-large picture, not a rectangle of black bars.

There's no reason not to shoot in high-definition these days and every decent standard definition video camera made in
recent years supports anamorphic video, allowing you to use all of your available pixels. Shooting in 4:3 letterboxed drops your
effective video resolution from 480 lines down to 360, thowing away a quarter of your video resolution in an era
when standard-definition is already becoming substandard.

So stop it. Almost half the standard-definition DV movies I get in these days are still shot like this and it makes it harder to
sell your film. Distributors and Elder Gods alike will turn up their noses (and tentacles) at your puny letterboxed resolution
and cut slices off the top and bottom of the advance check they give to you.

According to Hansen's lawyers, the continued sales of the offending brew "will undoubtedly create a
likelihood of confusion and/or dilute the distinctive quality of Hansen's MONSTER marks."

It's one of those David-versus-Goliath battles that plays well on the net and sells papers, so it's gotten a decent
amount of coverage and, predictably, a lot of people saying they won't be buying Monster Energy or Hansen's
products as a result.

Rock Art Brewery Vermonster Ale(not an energy drink)

No doubt you can see the close resemblance between the Vermonster label on the right and the Monster Energy
Drink stylized "M." Putting a fearsome kokopelli, perhaps one of the most terrifying monsters in any
Native American mythology, on the label would obviously cause a lot of people to have a tough time
distinguishing Vermonster Ale from Monster Energy Drink...at least if they happen to be lawyers.

Warning: DO NOT DRINK

Hansen, not satisfied by merely going after smaller beverage manufacturers, apparently has decided to broaden their anti-infringing
legal efforts, since this morning I received the
aforementioned not-spam-even-if-it-looks-like-it email from Continental Enterprises, claiming that I am advertising
and/or selling products that are confusingly similar to Monster Energy Drink™ and issuing the "demand that I discontinue
[my] advertisement and sale of these products."

What products, you ask? I've been in a few horror films, including monster movies such as
The Shadow Walkers
released by Lionsgate a couple of years back (and, yes, I played the monster). As you might imagine, a movie is a lot like a beverage, except that it has a lower
moisture content and doesn't usually come in cans or bottles. Well, and you can put a movie in your DVD player and watch it on your TV, which
doesn't work nearly as well with energy drinks, especially the ones with ginseng in them.

But apart from that, they're a lot alike.

me in the cafeteria betwen takes on The Shadow Walkers

You can see in the above picture, taken behind the scenes while we were filming The Shadow Walkers, the uncanny
resemblance between the monster "M" logo and the silhouette of me in the movie poster behind it. The proportions are a little
different, but if you look at how I'm holding my arms away from my torso, there's a definite M-ish quality to the pose. For anyone who can't distinguish a
beverage from an actor, this could indeed cause a likelihood of confusion between Monster Energy Drink™ and me. (In case you're
confused, I'm the one on the left.)

As a side note, the above picture (which has taken on a life of its own and tends to turn up embedded in message boards
and other webpages across the internet) was taken when I was discussing the possibility of a product placement agreement with
Hansen's. Nothing ever came of it at the time, but I thought the picture was amusing enough all the same.

Anyway, Hansen's will have to go after Lionsgate in the US (and whichever other distribution companies have the movie in the rest
of the world) if they want to stop the sales and promotion of The Shadow Walkers. If they'd like, however, I'd be happy
to appear in the sequel with their lawyer and see which of us is really the more monstrous.

The one thing I was expecting to get was a movie, though perhaps I should have been more
wary considering that Wolverine is a 20th Century Fox release and they have a particular fondness
for creating defective and broken disks. The half-hour of ads before the movie play just fine on the Blu-Ray disk,
the special features and menus work great...even the series of flying logos before the feature play withourt a hitch
(because we all go to the theater to watch back-to-back flying logos...and just one animated 20th Century Fox logo
is never enough). But less than ten seconds of trying to play the movie itself would lock up the player. It didn't
matter whether I was starting from the beginning or from the chapter selection menu: any part of the movie itself,
beginning, middle, or end would lock things right up and require restarting the player.

But as long as I wanted to watch ads or logos, no problem.

Mark Steven Grove(soon to be in Wolverine II?)

Looking around on the net, it seems like I'm hardly the only one having this problem with the Wolverine Blu-Ray. At this
point the only way to get a playable copy is to get the software to rip the Blu-Ray and burn a decrypted copy--or buy a pirated
copy from someone else who has already done the same.

So why put up all those anti-piracy warnings and then release a disk where only pirated copies are actually playable?

On the plus side, since I bought the super-deluxe version that includes a standard-definition DVD too, at least I got a bonus
playable copy to go with my high-definition coaster.

Royalty cheque from ILC Prime, Limited

20th Century Fox isn't the only troublesome distributor this week: after four years of wrangling and correspondence,
we finally did receive a royalty payment from a distribution deal inked more than five years ago with ILC Prime, Ltd.,
in the UK. Granted, for three of those years, they've been in bankruptcy, which gives them an excuse for being tardy
during that period, but it's not like they were making it a habit to pay their bills before that either.

But after five years, here it is: they're offering to settle for seven pence. I've scanned the envelope that they'd sent the
cheque in as well, just so you could see that they spent one pound, thirty-three to post that seven-pence cheque. My guess
is that they'd already spent at least twenty or thirty pounds on postage before now, just sending me regular updates to let me
know that the bankruptcy proceedings were still proceeding, however slowly and non-payingly.

Meanwhile, back on the ranch (or server farm, as the case may be), I'd run into some problems building Orochi, the dual
LGA1366 ASUS Z8NA-D6C based system with its pair of Intel x5570 Xeons that I'd been building to speed up our video rendering.
After about ten days of testing (I believe in testing), it would no longer boot when warm. If you let it sit for a few hours, it would
start up just fine and after that it would run just fine...but if you ever rebooted it or power-cycled it, it would lock up until you'd
let it sit again and cool off for a few hours.

Usually a problem like that does not get better; normally it means that the board is due to fail completely before long, so back
it went for repair or replacement.

ASUS Z8NA-D6Cdual-socket LGA1366 "Nehalem" ATX motherboard

And the replacement worked fine for about a week-and-a-half, too. Then I decided to update the BIOS to the latest release. That
worked fine at first, but after I'd walked away from it for an hour, it went into sleep mode...and could not be re-awakened. Not even
the "clear CMOS" jumper had any effect.

However, after many trials and tribulations, it turned out that if I removed the battery, then it would boot just fine again, except with
the date and configuration cleared. But at least it worked...until I'd shut it down from the Windows "start" button, and it was
back to perma-sleep mode until I took out the battery again. Rebooting, restarting, power-cycling, shutting it off during POST and
then firing it up later would all work fine, but Windows "shut down" command would require taking it apart and removing the battery
to get it to start up again.

Finally I went back to the original release BIOS. That fixed the perma-sleep bug and Orochi was ready for prime-time. I added an
Nvidia GTX260 video card, an Intel X25-M 160GB Solid State drive for OS and boot, four 1.5 terabyte drives for data, and wrapped it
all in a Coolermaster Cosmos 1000. Now we get to see how it fares compared to the single-socket I7 machines for that heavy-duty
Maya magic.

That's just wrong. Put one of these on your wall and your friends and neighbors will probably think you
go around hunting Snuffles. If you're not careful they'll go and make an animated Christmas special
with you as the evil, heartless bad guy.

...then you'd have to stand up and sing and dance with the heroes when they saved the Snuffles and
showed you the error of your ways just before the final commercial break. You wouldn't want that,
would you?

At the same time, I'm trying to consolidate more of our production and post-production in-house as a general
plan to maximize efficiency and control while reducing costs. My tinkering with high-performance computing
techniques and higher-bandwidth distributed processing has had to take a back seat to dealing with the adventures
of daily life. Having the additional rendering capability online would save a bunch of time and certainly will be
a great asset in the long run, but it's going to take some time I don't have right now to get it ready for prime time.

So we're still limping along with only a handful of I7 workstations and a single MacPro, but compared to how we
were doing things even as recently as a year ago, we're actually limping pretty darned fast.

Martin Kove as Galaron in Gathering of Heroes

The other day Martin Kove came into town to play
the character of Galaron, the spirit of an ancient and powerful warrior, whose essence is dedicated to protecting the
Shield of the Dead from all who try to take it for their own. Above, you can see he is facing Sam Del Rio, playing Jeris, a
living warrior with that very ambition.

I won't spoil the ending for you, but the ensuing battle took considerable advantage of Sam's supernatural ability to defy
gravity, something not normally seen in living warriors, especially not in this day and age.

Sometimes it's okay to bring a pen knife to a swordfight.

Unfortunately, I had forgotten to bring my armor...or even a sword. ("Why do I keep doing that? Is it just because
the whole armor-and-sword motif makes the grocery store baggers nervous? ...or that embarrassing incident when
my sword got caught in the spokes of my bike wheel?") But we had a mature discussion of the
issues and negotiated terms for Martin to join the cast of The Highwayman as well.

(It actually wasn't *that* tough a negotiation. Marty is a big fan of The Highwayman and could recite the poem
from memory.)

Martin Kove as Roan Blackthorn and Macleish Day as William Stiles

So we built a blacksmith's shop for the scene. Jon and Mark assembled the walls we'd used in some other shoots
on the greenscreen and repurposed a portion of Galaron's Crypt as a forge. Then, much banging of iron ensued, so
we were all both glad of and impressed by the strength of their construction.

Must get back to work, though. Have to work on materials for both Thailand and Australia at the moment.